1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the general field of magnetic resonance, and to methods and apparatus for their practice.
More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for using the apparatus, where the apparatus includes a housing including at least one cavity for housing a small mammal, where the housing includes a superconducting array of MRI elements cooled by liquid nitrogen and where the housing with an animal therein is designed to place in an MRI instrument and MRI images of the mammal obtained.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known that in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) when receiving signal coil noise dominates, overall system noise, using superconducting receiving coil, increases significantly as does overall signal-to-noise ratio of the MRI system. Superconducting coils in either surface coil or volume coil configuration are formed out of four or more sections of dielectric/superconductor or dielectric/metal strips. Strips are made out of thin high temperature superconducting (HTS) or metal thin films deposited on dielectric rigid or flexible substrates. Such strips are connected together via build-in capacitors. At each of the connections, YBCO layers are separated by dielectric layers to form capacitors. Resonant frequency is determined mainly by a length of the structure and a thickness of the dielectric layer separating the YBCO layers and a dielectric constant of the dielectric layer. Flat surface coils, saddle coils and volume birdcage coils have been designed.
Birdcage radio frequency coils have been widely used in magnetic resonance imaging because of their efficiency and azimuthal B1 field homogeneity and design of all superconducting birdcage for small animals has a practical potential. Thus, there is a need in the art for efficient small animal including small mammal MRI birdcage devices that have low noise and/or improved signal-to-noise ratios and have the capability of simultaneously housing multi-animals in a single device.